I am currently a member of the OpenStack Project Policy Board, and I am seeking re-election.

At Citrix, I lead a team of 20 in developing an OpenStack-based product (codenamed “Project Olympus” if you’re interested to find out more). This is a team that I have founded from scratch within Citrix, and it’s been growing all year.

This year we added:

XenServer support

VMware vSphere support

Microsoft Hyper-V support (well, we acquired Cloud.com, who did the work originally

XenServer Storage Manager volume support

Large parts of Quantum, the “Layer-2 Networking as a Service” component being worked on by a number of companies

and a whole bunch of other bugfixes and minor improvements.

We are also soon to share some machines with the community for use within a joint continuous integration system, so that patches submitted upstream can be tested on Citrix machines before they are merged.

Before I started on OpenStack I ran a number of teams within XenServer Engineering, and before that I was an early employee at XenSource. As such, I have a long history of open-source development in general, and virtualization development in particular. I’ve used Debian since Bo (which tells you how old I am) and I’ve been contributing to open-source projects ever since (some early SDK work for PostgreSQL was my first).

I’m now a member of the Xen Advisory Board, and will use my position there to influence Xen for the good of cloud computing and OpenStack. I believe that the Xen and OpenStack communities should be working together more closely, and I will work to make that happen.

I have spoken about OpenStack at a number of engagements, including OSCON and Xen Summit, and will do so throughout next year. I believe that OpenStack will be as important in the coming years as Linux and Apache have been, and I am taking its message of open development, governance, and implementation wherever I can.

I will use my position on the Project Policy Board to help OpenStack’s community move forward at speed, learning the lessons of the Xen project (good and bad) and influencing corporations (mine and others) to invest in OpenStack for the long term.